Bitcoin Mining Botnet Controlled via Twitter

As we all know, Bitcoin is basically fake money that people can automatically generate by leaving a computer on. Sure, to make significant progress, one would need a fairly powerful rig, but Bitcoins are still able to be generated out of nothing — mined by forcing the computer to complete complex mathematical problems in order to prevent the sudden influx of billions of Bitcoins. The more computational power directed toward solving the mathematical problems, the quicker Bitcoins can be generated. Not everyone can afford to buy a bunch of computers and set them up to mine Bitcoins, so taking after spam email botnets, Bitcoin miners have attempted to compromise other people’s computers in order to gain their computational power to put toward Bitcoin mining. Instead of some low-key controller directing the compromised computers behind the scenes, F-Secure found one Bitcoin botnet being controlled over Twitter.

A generator, which creates the bots, sets a Twitter account to be the one that can be used to control the Bitcoin mining botnet. F-Secure points out that they detect bots created with this generator as Trojan.Generic.KD.

Whether or not one supports nefarious activities like compromising unsuspecting computers and forcing them to do math (a heinous crime) in order to generate fake money, one must wonder why someone decided to control their illegal botnet through a third party platform that has the power to shut down the controller without much of a fight.